Related papers: Aligner-Guided Training Paradigm: Advancing Text-t…

Acoustics-to-word models are end-to-end speech recognizers that use words as targets without relying on pronunciation dictionaries or graphemes. These models are notoriously difficult to train due to the lack of linguistic knowledge. It is…

The rapid development of neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems enabled its usage in other areas of natural language processing such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) or spoken language translation (SLT). Due to the large number of…

Efficiently fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific tasks presents a considerable challenge in natural language processing. Traditional methods, like prompt or prefix tuning, typically rely on arbitrary tokens for training,…

Most previous neural text-to-speech (TTS) methods are mainly based on supervised learning methods, which means they depend on a large training dataset and hard to achieve comparable performance under low-resource conditions. To address this…

While speaking at different rates, articulators (like tongue, lips) tend to move differently and the enunciations are also of different durations. In the past, affine transformation and DNN have been used to transform articulatory movements…

Recent parallel neural text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis methods are able to generate speech with high fidelity while maintaining high performance. However, these systems often lack control over the output prosody, thus restricting the…

This paper presents a transfer learning method in speech emotion recognition based on a Time-Delay Neural Network (TDNN) architecture. A major challenge in the current speech-based emotion detection research is data scarcity. The proposed…

We propose a novel approach for training large language models (LLMs) to adhere to objectives defined within a latent embedding space. Our method leverages reinforcement learning (RL), treating a pre-trained LLM as an environment. Our…

Purpose: This work explores the use of external phrase break prediction models to enhance listener comprehension in End-to-End Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems. Methods: The effectiveness of these models is evaluated based on listener…

Diffusion-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have made remarkable progress in zero-shot speech synthesis, yet optimizing all components for perceptual metrics remains challenging. Prior work with DMOSpeech demonstrated direct metric…

Linguistic entrainment, or alignment, represents a phenomenon where linguistic patterns employed by conversational participants converge to one another. While entrainment has been shown to produce a more natural user experience, most…

Speech recognition and speech synthesis models are typically trained separately, each with its own set of learning objectives, training data, and model parameters, resulting in two distinct large networks. We propose a parameter-efficient…

Pre-trained language models (PLM) have demonstrated their effectiveness for a broad range of information retrieval and natural language processing tasks. As the core part of PLM, multi-head self-attention is appealing for its ability to…

Currently, large language models (LLMs) predominantly focus on the text modality. To enable more natural human-AI interaction, speech LLMs are emerging, but building effective end-to-end speech LLMs remains challenging due to limited data…

We explore cross-dialect text-to-speech (CD-TTS), a task to synthesize learned speakers' voices in non-native dialects, especially in pitch-accent languages. CD-TTS is important for developing voice agents that naturally communicate with…

Human talkers often address listeners with language-comprehension challenges, such as hard-of-hearing or non-native adults, by globally slowing down their speech. However, it remains unclear whether this strategy actually makes speech more…

Current Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems typically use separate models for speech-prompted and text-prompted timbre control. While unifying both control signals into a single model is desirable, the challenge of cross-modal alignment often…

Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) has witnessed rapid progress in recent years, where neural methods became capable of producing audios with high naturalness. However, these efforts still suffer from two types of latencies: (a) the {\em…

Test-time training (TTT) methods explicitly update the weights of a model to adapt to the specific test instance, and they have found success in a variety of settings, including most recently language modeling and reasoning. To demystify…

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising tools for assisting in medical tasks, yet processing Electronic Health Records (EHRs) presents unique challenges due to their longitudinal nature. While LLMs' capabilities to perform…